Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-19-Speech-3-201-000"
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"en.20110119.20.3-201-000"2
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"Madam President, for decades now, the Member States of the European Union have been making broad and benign progress towards the principles of equality of treatment before the law, of privacy and of personal freedom, so I hope that there will not be a retrograde step in any of the Member States on this issue of equality on the basis of sexual orientation. I do not think there will be. A point that has been missed in this debate, as Mr Landsbergis has just reminded us and as Mr van Dalen reminded us earlier, is that this is a proposal. It is not a legislative resolution.
As you will remember, we went through our own debates on this in Britain. We had our own arguments over Section 28. I was very unusual in my party in those days in being against it. I was against it even in the very earliest days when it was still called Section 27. It seemed to me utterly invidious to use the law as a mechanism to signal approval or disapproval. When we did that, we put an incredibly powerful weapon into the hands of the state that was later used in the bans on pistols and hunting and so on.
But the point is I am not a Lithuanian legislator. We might in this House have very strong views about abortion law in Poland or euthanasia law in the Netherlands. These are, for our constituents, sensitive issues that ought to be properly determined through the national mechanisms of each Member State. We should have the humility to recognise the right of democracy and parliamentary supremacy within the 27 Member States."@en1
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